Jerichow

93 minutes

After the assured metaphysical thriller Yella (2007), German writer-director Christian Petzold takes a crack at The Postman Always Rings Twice with this low-key thriller about a love triangle that festers into a murder plot. In a semirural area west of Berlin, a Turkish immigrant with a snack-machine business (Hilmi Sozer) loses his driver's license for driving drunk, so he hires a down-and-out army vet (Benno Furmann) to chauffeur him on his rounds servicing his machines; during his off-hours, the new employee services the boss's sexy, self-contained wife (smoldering Nina Hoss, who played the title character in Yella). At least one online critic has likened the film to Fassbinder's Sirkian melodramas, though Petzold cites as an influence Minnelli's Some Came Running; in any case he doesn't seem to have much invested in this personally, though it's undeniably well executed. In German with subtitles. By J.R. Jones